On Christmas day I got up late, made a quick call back to England, and rolled around my weirdly large hotel room for a while. Eventually, I got enough energy together to go for the coffee-seeking walk around downtown San Diego, and it was a little like the I Am Legend trailers that I’ve been bombarded with the last couple of weeks. I ended up celebrating Christmas morning by grabbing some brew from a 7-11 – now there’s a chain that must be thankful that Osama didn’t strike two months earlier – and sitting out in the sun reading The Stars My Destination. Can’t argue with that, really. In the evening, I met up with Bridget and the other Chris, and we ate at Molly’s, a great restaurant in a Marriott by the water, and then slept. The show opened to the media at 5:00am the next day, and we worked seventeen hours until it closed at 10:00pm. All in all, it was an ok way to spend Christmas on a year that I would have rather just hadn’t happened, so I was fine.

I’ve been meaning to blog about various things San Diego over the last weeks, but haven’t had the time, quite simply. We were busy building the show, doing the show and, err, eating… there’s been good eating. Thai and Indian are pretty well represented around here. I’m chilling in the Air New Zealand [soul destroyingly beige] lounge at Los Angeles airport now, so I’ve finally got time to write.

I took a lot of photos when we had time off around town, and they’re pretty good. Here’s a taster:

Now I’m flying home overnight, losing most of a day, and using various chemicals and parlor tricks to kick my curvy arse back into a reasonable time zone by next week. It’s New Year, soon, and I’ll have to try and make some shit up to pass off as resolutions.

Hope you all have a good one, by the way.

On Thursday, a friend mailed a gag to an office-wide email list, which went something like this:

I bought a teddy bear for ?10. I named him Muhammad, and sold him for ?20. My question is, have I made a prophet?

Responses included comments questioning how a man of his intelligence (he’s a very, very clever guy, and one of the quickest comedians I’ve seen) could find such a thing funny. I’m not sure if I’m surprised or not, but he was made to send an official apology out afterwards. This upsets me, because it is my strong opinion that if people are of that much intelligence, then they should realise that free speech and the ability to laugh are far more important than what you call a fucking teddy bear.

I believe that you should respect a person regardless of their culture and race, and I believe that you should try and be good to people at all times, but I’m not sure where I stand on respecting religions. I used to mix them in with race, and I still defend Islam vehemently when I hear ridiculous statements about it from Christians or Zionists, but in the same way that I don’t respect the parts of Christianity that teach blind obedience in the face of logical decisions, I’m not sure that I do, or should, respect elements of Islam that wish to lock people in a Sudanese prison for making a naive mistake naming a teddy bear.

Oh, and in case this didn’t make the news in the US, you can find the news in this article.

I’m interested in people’s thoughts. In a mischievous and possible unwise bout of curiosity, I sent the above joke out (as if from me, rather than as a forward) to my small office address book after the shit hit the fan. I didn’t receive a single reply, which is, err, not normal thank you very much. My guess is that people were probably insulted, but what I wanted was responses and to understand why. I certainly don’t have all the answers on this one. Dear all knowing blog-brain, enlighten me?